The Dual shock 3 batteries are also really easy to replace. Maybe pushing the boundaries of what you’d reasonably call “user replaceable” but certainly something that I think anyone capable of usin g the controller and a PS3 would be capable of.
As an American I can confirm it goes back way further than 1950.
I think the main hangup is going to be: how easy and simple is this thing for the average person?
The Steam Deck is, any way you slice it, a better value than the Switch or Switch 2. The Steam Deck has sold roughly 6 million units in 3 years. The Nintendo Switch 2 has sold close to 11 million units in about 5 months.
I hope you’re right and that Valve really shakes up the whole industry, but I’m not going to start expecting that until I see it.
“It was just a joke bro, why are you taking everything so seriously? I was only spreading misleading information about a state’s economy in a conversation about economic policies, no big deal right?”
Using nominal GDP just shows how bad-faith your argument is. There’s no such thing as a “retirement state”- every state has retired people in it.
You can make whatever excuse you want- that won’t change the fact that Florida is full of people who are not producing much GDP.
In 2024 Florida was 35th in GDP per capita, well below the US average.
Florida is still about 3x the GDP per capita of Argentina, so you’re correct that it would be a huge boon for them.
Dimensia Donny seems like a nickname that could fit
Disney could have just looked at Target as an example of exactly why they shouldn’t have done this.
Source? The article only confirms that he is Israeli, doesn’t mention his religion at all. Because it’s not fucking relevant.
Russian citizens who refused to condemning the Ukraine invasion have faced similar consequence. There’s plenty of precedent internationally for these sorts of decisions. The only difference here is that Israel has been purposefully supplying propaganda for decades to conflate antizionism with antisemitism.
Why are you assuming the religiosity of an Israeli person?
Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.
The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.
I gave my opinion and you have not changed it: I would still say that the Deck’s triggers are better than the Dualsense’s.
I’m not sure what you mean? The Steam Deck, and a TON of other controllers have analog triggers. Sony has been using them since the PS3. The GameCube used them, though Nintendo has gone back-and-forth on analog vs digital triggers. Every Xbox controller has had analog triggers. Most VR systems have analog triggers. It’s hard to speak for an entire industry, but I think most 3rd party controllers have analog triggers unless they are soecifically intended to replace a Nintendo one that doesn’t have it (like the JoyCons).
For the ADAPTIVE part… Yeah the Dualsense has it and nothing else does. I suppose where you and I disagree is in judging how important that is. To me, that was a fun little gimmick in Astro’s Play Room and Ratchet & Clank, but I can’t even remember any other games supporting it. Even in those games I thought it was a bit tiring on my fingers after prolonged periods of use. If we could knock $10 off the price of the Dualsense by removing it I would totally do that. It’s also worth noting that 3rd parties like 8Bitdo have similar hair-trigger features that physically reduce the travel distance and turn them into digital inputs.
When it comes to all the other aspects- the material, the springs, the radius, the shape, the texture, the ability to customize in software - in my opinion the Deck is better than the Dualsense in all of those areas.
I don’t mean to come across as hating on the Dualsense. It’s a great controller and my 2nd favorite behind the Deck for most games. I actually bought a Dualsense for PC use more than a year before I bought my PS5. For triggers specifically,
For me personally, I would compare adaptive triggers to other gimmicks like analog face buttons, the light bar on the Dualshock 4 (which was ironically way better on PC than PlayStation), the built in speaker and microphone on the Dualshock 4 and Dualsense, the WiiU, the 3 prongs of the N64 controller, the VMU of the Dreamcast, the IR camera on the Right JoyCon, NFC readers, etc.
Somewhat related was that I did not mention haptics in my original comment. I’d say the Dualsense has the best haptics, but the Steam Deck is a close second. This is another feature where it’s cool when the Dualsense uses it like in Astro’s Playroom, but it’s so rare for games to actually use it in interesting ways that it doesn’t matter much. With the Deck, it’s quintessential to how the track pads work, and the operating system itself makes great use of it. It can’t do all of the spectacular haptic details, but the Deck has a nice subtle approach that makes the whole thing just feel more substantial. The Dualsense uses haptics for immersion while the Deck uses it more for feedback and feel.
The Steam Deck, in all its variants, has sold under 4 million units as of February .
The PS5 has sold over 80 million units. Even the miserable Xbox Series has over 28 million units sold.
All use custom AMD APU’s. Valve is more than an order of magnitude away from even competing with Sony. And we haven’t even touched on laptops yet.
But also compared to desktops… I can’t find how much AMD in particular did, but I can see that 251 million desktop GPU’s were sold in 2024. I don’t know how many Deck’s were sold in 2024 by comparison, but given that the total fron the 2021 launch to early 2025 is estimated at 4 million units on the high side, it’s not even blip on the radar. It’s not a statistically significant amount. The Deck is absolutely miniscule in comparison.
What gives you this idea?
AMD just launched the 9700 and 9700XT earlier this year, with MSRP’s of $550 and $600. They’ve faced a ton of consumer backlash because MSRP cards were virtually nonexistent. Most of the graphics cards actually produced were retailed for hundreds of dollars more, and many were then scalped on top of that.
NVIDIA has been even worse, just cranking up their prices with very little performance improvement. Tons of issues with their power connectors damaging cards. Most of the company’s focus has been on AI, and gamers have been left out to dry.
So yeah I think now would be a terrible time for a steam machine. Unless Valve can somehow get their hands on some unreasonably cheap silicon.
I hear you, but I’m not willing to trust the charger in there even with a 3D printed insert. Give me a proper pocket with a snap, Velcro, zipper, clip, etc.
Changing the SSD was easy and a big cost savings. I bought the cheapest model and upgraded to 512GB because at the time it was a huge price spike to go up to 1TB. My understanding now is that 1TB, or even 1.5TB, makes a lot more sense. Maybe even 2TB, though they are still a lot.
This applies to PC gaming in general, but even moreso for the Deck. The question is not “will it run?”- it is incredibly rare to find any game that simply will not run at all. The questiona are: how well does it run, and how much am I willing to sacrifice to get there? If you want, you can download Aperture Desk Job for free and play through the whole thing in one sitting. It’s incredibly easy to install on a stock Deck with just a couple of button presses, all the controls are mapped perfectly, and it’s designed to look and run great on a Deck. Other games will be more complicated.
I recently went to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a friend. It’s Verified, but the experience just sucks. It installed just fine, and since it knows it’s on Deck it handles the annoying Larian launcher thing fine. But even when I cranked all of the visual settings to their lowest and limited the Deck to 30FPS, it was still playing the game with the fan on max, loudly blasting hit air out. I think the battery life was less than an hour. The 720p screen really does the game poorly, and the controller UI is… Impressive, but still nowhere near as good as M&KB.
Skyrim is another example. Runs pretty well once you’re in there, but there’s an annoying splash screen first. So you need to either go into the launch options to turn it off (but that’s the only way to adjust the visual settings to make sure you do that first), or just leave a track pad as a mouse (including press-to-click) for that game so you can click past the splash screen and go back to controller mode. Or just use the touch screen if you prefer.
Everything is a balance. Battery life, fan noise, heat, resolution, visual post-processing, frame rate. It’s subjective, and you may want to play a game differently when you’re on your couch vs when you’re on a plane, for example.
I’ve heard of NVIDIA’s Moonlight and the community-made AMD version Sunshine as well. But I think Nvidia has stopped their support, and personally I never even got Sunshine to install on my desktop. Steam Remote Play has dramatically improved over the years and is say it’s pretty good now.
Sony has their official PS Remote Play app for Windows and Android that allows those devices to steam from PS4’s and PS5’s. I assume this is what the PS Portal uses too. There is no official app for Linux, but there is a 3rd party one called Chiaki. You can also install this as a non-Steam game and stream. I’m playing Bloodborne on the Deck on my porch right now as I’m taking this.
The solution? Syncthing. Install this app on your Deck as a non-Steam game. Install it on your desktop, your android TV box, your phone, your old laptop, your NAS. Whether it’s backups or synchronization, it’s great. I’ll catch a Pokemon on my Deck in an emulator, save, move to my desktop, open the save using PKHex, make the pokemon Shiny, then go back to the Deck and enjoy my new shiny pokemon.
My right one worked great to start, and my left knee still does. Over the past year I could feel it slowly get worse. It feels like normal wear and tear to me, just that I used it hard with a few mouse-centric games.
I did look on iFixit but they don’t have replacements. I’m not too surprised, and I’m not really upset with Valve, because it’s a pretty new thing and they are still way better than their competition. I just hope that eventually they release an improved version.
Taxing the rich is not just “oh we as a society want money to do things, so let’s take that money from the people who have it”.
Taxing the rich is about removing the incentives that wealthy people have to seek out and hoard more wealth. Get them to stop trying to control everything and seek rents. Convince them to just be satisfied with being, in 2025, a USD hundred-millionaire. Force them to enjoy an early retirement.